1

MAKING LIFE LIVABLE: trans-sexuality and bodily transformation.

we do not recognize ourselves at the level of feeling, desire and the body, at the
moments before the mirror, in the moments before the window, in the times that one
turns to psychologists , to psychiatrists, to medical and legal professionals to
negotiate what may well feel like the unrecognizability of ones gender and hence the
unrecognizability of ones personhood.
i


I
The aim of this paper is to try and make sense of transsexual
ii
desire for body
modification, given the apparent inadequacy of a certain model of understanding this
desire. This model, in a way that makes this issue complex, is the one informing
psychiatric and surgical practice, and perceived conformity to it is often necessary for
access to the hormones and surgery which bring about the desired bodily
transformations. The model which is problematic is something like this. Transsexual
people from an early age take themselves to have a gender which is at variance with
the biological sex of the body. They experience their body as the wrong body. They
experience their body as alien because it fails to capture their gender identity. Gender
identity, here, is conceived of as something fixed independently of the body,
somehow lying behind it, which the body can fail to reflect. Body modification is
desired to bring bodies into line with the real gender identity which is taken to
constitute subjectivity. Body modification brings experienced gender and bodily sex
into line and enables people to live as real women and men. As Jay Prosser remarks
"trans sexuality in fact appears as a narrative; a plot typically beginning in childhood
recognition of cross gendered difference and ending, again typically, with the
transsexual achieving some marker of becoming, some degree of closure."
iii
In
these narratives there are certain recurrent features, the feeling of being trapped in the
wrong body, childhood feelings of difference and a failure to conform to gendered
stereotypes, and a telos; the reaching of a home of gendered realness most commonly
achieved by some degree of bodily modification which enables the possibility of
social passing. Here the changing of the flesh, the modification of the body is taken as
the guarantee of a gendered realness. Such a narrative claims a communality of real
gender between transsexual men and women and biological men and women who
comfortably inhabit their categories as male and female.
2

There are a number of problems with this picture. What could such gendered realness
consist in? It does not appear to have its origin in the biological body for we have to
employ technological means to bring the body into line with it. Moreover the picture
assumes a single kind of narrative when there seems to be a multiplicity of
differences. "not everyone who experiences gender dysphoria experiences it in the
same way, and not everyone deals with it in the same way. Not all transgendered
individuals take hormones and not everyone who takes hormones is transgendered .I
have a(genetically female) friend who identifies as male and passes perfectly. He's
never had a shot. I certainly know dykes who are butcher than I could ever be, but
who wouldn't consider identifying as anything other than women."
iv
. Moreover the
assumption of a real gender, originating in childhood, rules out other possibilities:
it cant be that you went to ..clubssaw that certain ways of living were possible
and desirable , and that something about your own possibilities became clear to you.
v

Moreover , even when surgery takes place there is no comfortable home. The body
retains traces, severe scarring, and, for example, in female to male transitions, there is
no way to reproduce a functioning penis. Surgery and hormones seem to be no
guarantee of gaining a body with a real gender, what ever that might be.
vi


In this paper I want to try and make sense of the demand for bodily modification
without an assumption that in some ontological or originary way, anyone, including
those seeking surgery or hormones, are really men and women. I shall suggest that
gender identities, along with others, are something which we may lay claim to, on our
own behalf and on behalf of others. The paper is not an attempt to provide conditions
which fix gender identity. It is rather, in the absence of a truth about gender an
attempt to make intelligible people laying claim to being male or female and in some
instances expressing that claim by a request for body modification.

II
In contrast to a model of trans-sexuality which requires a conception of real gender
identity, the advent of queer theory offered a quite different kind of analysis. Trans
people of all kind, whether or not seeking bodily modification were seen as the
gender outlaws, making evident the social constructedness of the gender identities of
3
us all. For Judith Butler in, Gender Trouble,
vii1
concerned to de -naturalise all gender
categories, trans -gendered people challenged the normative categorisation into male
and female and opened up the possibility of numerous sex/gender/sexual
identifications, highlighting the radical indeterminateness of positioning in the
sex/gender system. Sandy Stone for example writes, "I am suggesting that in the
transsexuals erased history we can find a story disruptive to the accepted discourses of
gender ...For a transsexual, as a transsexual, to generate a... counter discourse is to
speak from outside the boundaries of gender , beyond the constructed oppositional
nodes which have been predefined as the only positions from which discourse is
possibleIn the transsexual as text we may find the potential to map the refigured
body onto conventional gender discourse and thereby disrupt it, to take advantage of
the dissonances created by such a juxtaposition to fragment and reconstitute the
elements of gender in new and unexpected geometries."
viii
Within queer theory,
therefore, transsexuality becomes the marker of the fictionality of all gendered
categories and their potential for performative re-articulation.

Within this early queer theory transgendering of all kinds finds a theoretical home
only by being positioned as a vanguard of political activism, challenging public
gender norms. But although many transgendered people may accept a position as
gender outlaw, for others it seems inappropriate. They are often seeking a form of life
as male and female in which gender norms are adopted rather then undermined.
Moreover positioning of all trans people within such a political vanguard cannot make
sense of the transsexual demand for sexed embodiment, other than as a misguided
naturalism about sexual identity , consequent on immersion in hegemonic discourses.
There are certainly many trans people who do not request bodily modification , and
many who are happy for their trans identities to be easily visible. But there are many
others to whom the goals of passing and, inter-connectedly, of bodily change, seem
necessary for a functional life. It is this latter group for whom the performative
account of gender, found in Butlers early work, doesnt make sufficient sense.





4
III

Butler has, however, returned to the discussion of the trans community and issues of
bodily transformation in her more recent work. Here she retains transsexuality as a
marker within a discourse of liberation and emancipation drag, butch, femme,
transgender, transsexual persons show us the body is not a static and
accomplished fact buta mode of becoming that, in becoming otherwise, exceeds the
norm, reworks the norm, and makes us see how realities to which we thought we were
confined are not written in stone
ix
This, in itself, is problematic, given how many
transsexual narratives read more like stories of survival than like stories of liberation.
However this later discussion is also marked by a more sober reflection on the
conditions which make living within a social community possible. She introduces a
consideration of the conditions which make a life livable, and it is in relation to this,
that we are to understand and justify the demands that gender ..be established ..non
coercively
x
In raising the question of what makes a life livable or unlivable Butler
has in mind both the external violence which is often directed against the trans
community,
xi
, and the rates of suicide and self harm found within it. (Both factors sit
in tension with the emancipatory discourse which she also wishes to employ.) What is
producing these levels of violence is for Butler a lack of recognition of bodily
difference. She adopts the Hegelian position that desire is always a desire for
recognition , and that it is only through the experience of recognition that any of us
become constituted as socially viable beings.
xii
However she argues that this
recognition is offered according to prevailing social norms. But if my options are
loathsome , if I have no desire to be recognized within a certain set of norms , then it
follows that my sense of survival depends on escaping the clutch of those norms by
which recognition is conferred I may feel that without some recognizability I
cannot live .But I may also feel that the terms by which I am recognized make life
unlivable.
xiii


For Butler this makes urgent the task of transforming the prevailing social norms to
allow recognition of forms of bodily difference that are, according to her, currently
rendered unintelligible. It is this public unintelligibility which leads to the status of
unlivability, which she highlights. In a way that echoes her earlier work, the route
which seems open to enable such recognition requires the reconfiguration of these
5
norms. Again the trans person seems to have no option but to be in the vanguard of a
public political activism. When our systems of classification and public norms have
been transformed so that certain bodily shapes no longer signal patterns of gendered
behaviour , or of desire; indeed when such patterns of behaviour no longer line up
together in ways that yield dichotomies of gender, there will not be issues of public
unintelligibility, and consequently no need for surgery to try and bring it about. For
Butler, then, what is needed for those who find themselves unintelligible in terms of
public norms, is to challenge and re-articulate them. These are important strategies.
But such political activism should not be the especial or required preserve of those
who lay claim to trans identities . For many people, the only route which appears to be
open to make their life livable, is some kind of accommodation with public forms of
intelligibility, if they are to make sense of themselves, and other people are to make
sense of them.

I therefore want to develop Butlers thoughts about what makes a life livable in a
somewhat different direction, one which stresses , not recognition under some general
norm , but mutual intelligibility within everyday practices.
xiv
For Butler intelligibility
requires conformity to some public norm. I would like to suggest, in contrast, that
intelligibility consists of people being able to find their feet with each other in
everyday interactions. It is this kind of making sense to ourselves and others, which I
would suggest is necessary if life is to be livable. Making sense is a public project. As
Butler says I am struggling fora conception of myself as invariably in a
community, impressed on by others, impressing them as well
xv
It is into this ongoing
interaction that our gendered categories fit, bestowing meaning interdependently on
our bodies and our modes of engaging with others, making shared engagement with
the world possible. Finding life unlivable here is not being able to find ones feet in the
everyday practices of the variable, and local, communities, in which we are placed.
To lay claim to an identity as male or female, or as a trans man or woman, is to
struggle to find ones place in such practices.
In a recent book the author, Norah Vincent describes a period of her life in which she
lived as a man, and the extract below illustrates what is involved in finding ones feet
in everyday practices in a way that requires a gendered position. She describes the
6
sets of relations into which she enters when she takes part, as a man, in a bowling
team.
The league manager led me toward the table where my new team-mates were sitting. Jim, my team
captain, introduced himself first. Next I met Allen. His greeting echoed Jim's - a presumption of
goodwill that seemed to mark me as a buddy from the start. Bob I met last. We didn't shake hands, just
nodded from across the table. We all usually ate junk food on those Monday nights, all of us except
Bob, who stuck to beer, but let us send his 12-year-old son Alex, who always tagged along on league
night, next door to the 7-Eleven to buy hot dogs, candy, soda, whateverEverything was out and
above board with these guys. If they were pissed at you, you'd know it. They were glad enough to see
me, but not glad enough to miss me if I didn't show. They were coming from long, wearying workdays
and they didn't have the energy for pretence Jim was the most forthcoming about his stupid flights of
machismo and the dumpsters they'd usually landed him in. "I remember when I was in the army," he'd
say, "and I was drunk off my ass as usual. And there was this huge guy playin' pool in the bar I was in.
And I don't know why, but I just flicked a beer coaster at him, and it hit him right in the back of the
head. And he turned around really slowly and he looked down at me and he said in this really tired
way, 'Do we really need to do this tonight?' And I said, 'Nah, you're right. We don't. Sorry.' So he
turned around, and fuck me if I didn't just throw another one and hit him again, right in the back of the
head. I don't know why I did it. No fuckin' idea. And I knew when I did it that he was gonna kick my
ass, so I turned around and tried to run, and I slipped in a puddle of beer and fell on my face, and he
just picked me right up and bashed the shit out of me. And the funniest thing about it was that the
whole time he was punching me, he kept apologising to me for having to do it." This was a source of
hilarity to everyone, the stupid crap you felt compelled to do as a guy finding your spot in the scheme
of things. I could never have predicted it, but part of me came really to enjoy those nights with the
guys. Their company was like an anchor at the beginning of the week, something I could look forward
to, an oasis
xvi
The interactions, modes of response , which she describes, were made
possible by the participants taking themselves to be engaging in shared practices of
masculinity; practices, incidentally, which could accommodate her lack of skill and
strength as one of the possibilities which could be negotiated: after a couple of months
when they got to know me a little better that they felt free enough to kid me now and then about how
much I sucked, letting me in. "Hey, we all got strikes this round," Bob would say, "except one. Who
was that, I wonder?" Then he'd smile at me while leaning back in his chair, dragging deeply on his
cigarette. I'd make a big show of giving him the finger, and we'd all laugh.
xvii

The use of gendered categories in ongoing and necessarily public narratives of the self
and the interconnected forms of life which they make possible , does not require any
set of characteristics shared by all people who use the categories in the stories they
tell about themselves . Gender is often a question of local reading, and even in local
7
contexts can be very variable. Contrast the kind of femininity claimed in the following
two extracts;
Becky Birtha. ..is eight when she spied this lady She aint nobodies mama-Im sure. And she aint
wearing Sunday clothes. She got on blue jeans and a mans shirt , with the tail hanging out. She got
patches on her blue jeans and she still got her chin stuck out like she some kinda african royalty
xviii


"I feel small and neat ..My blouse and skirt are light ..My shoes make my feet look more delicate than
they are,.. besides giving me ..a suggestion of vulnerability that I rather like ..when I walk out into the
street I feel ready for the worlds appraisal, in a way I never felt as a man
xix

Consequently in different situations people might use a different terminology to give
an account of themselves. Patricia Zavelleas tells the story of Maria Perez. Maria,
growing up in Mexico, and coming to desire women, articulates her subjectivity as
male and adopts the machismo lifestyle which went with it. Later, moving to the US
and finding lesbian communities with a different range of gendered possibilities , she
sees herself as a woman, and allows her body shape to change, to become rounder.
xx

An account of gendered and other identity categories as being anchored simply in an
ability to find ones feet in everyday practices with others, in a way that allows mutual
intelligibility, may seem overly conservative. It can suggest that we are stuck with the
frameworks in which we find ourselves, and have to locate ourselves within them. But
such a conclusion underestimates the openness of our linguistic categories and their
inter related forms of life. In laying claim to an identity as woman, and an
intelligible place in communal practices which that suggests, the transsexual woman
is also reconfiguring that category. But if her life is to be livable in the sense I have
been articulating, then that reconfiguration needs to be one which others around her
can find intelligible. Of course it is often the case that such intelligibility can be found
within certain communities and not others. Where it is absent, the only way to make
life livable is to seek to pass. The closest way of making sense of ones life and
being able to participate in shared practices may be to simply position oneself as
male or female. What we find in transsexual autobiography are subjects painfully
negotiating gendered positions which best make sense of their life and desires and
enable them to take part in shared communal practices where they can interact and be
made sense of by others. The possibility of negotiating an intelligible subjectivity ,
which requires finding possible modes of sociability, are increased when our
categories are reconfigured to allow transgendering, and when the content of the
8
categories man and woman visibly display a large range of non -dichotomous social
interactions. Here the possibilities for finding ones feet expand.
IV
To stress the importance of communal practices in our lives is not to claim that our
identity is fixed by the recognition of others. It is problematic to think of identities as
being fixed, as constituting some truth about ourselves , whether that fixing is linked
to inner phenomenology or outer processes of recognition. The concern is rather to
signal the role communal practices play in making life livable , and the positioning
within them of identity claims made on our own behalf or on behalf of others. What is
central is the possibility of mutual intelligibility in our everyday life . We can explore
this, I suggest, without commitment to some kind of originary identity, or to a view
that sees social practices as themselves determining.
What might seem to mark the transsexual use of gendered terms is the sense of
operating with a language which does not feel like their own. . What marks
transsexual identity, Prosser claims, is the failure to be real...but a longing or
yearning to be so
xxi
Derrida in the autobiographical Monolingalism of the Other ,
uses his own position as an Algerian Jew, speaking French, the language of the
colonisers, to reflect on the position of the monolingual individual who has only
one language , but one which is not his.
xxii
In this text Derrida recognises a desire to
assign an origin to the complexity of such felt displacement , by imagining an
originary language in which the truth of identity could be spoken. But, of course,
there is no such source and no such origins, and the desire has to be viewed as a desire
to invent , as a first language , that which never existed. as though the point were to
produce by avowal, the truth of what had never taken place to create a past that has
never been present , with a thought of the future or the to come.
xxiii

Maybe it is in this light that we should view the transsexual narratives with the
trajectory we began by describing. The account which Derrida is offering here may be
thought to apply particularly to the post colonial context , or as adapted here, to the
position of trans identities, in which childhood is revisited in the light of present
desires and the narrative of ones life is presented as a search for an originating
identity. But Derrida also suggests that the search for such an originary language is a
desire we all share, as we fail to recognise our singularity in what is on offer to us.
9
What we must recognise , he suggest, is that any identity is only a relatively gathered
dispersion or scatter of singularitieswhich must not be mortgaged to the phantom
of ontological fulfilment.
xxiv
Here the phantom of ontological fulfilment is the
phantom of an originary identity which guarantees or legitimates the place we wish to
claim in our local interactions. In its place is simply a picture of people laying claim
to a position in which they find it possible to live.
V
Trans men and women lay claim to gendered terms, as relatively gathered
singularities, to be enabled to take part in local, communal social practices in a way
that is intelligible to themselves and others. The terms are employed to make life
livable. In doing this the content of these terms are also reconfigured in ways that
reverberate through the narratives of a range of so called biological men and women,
many of whom are variously embodied, who also claim them. How, specifically,
does this impact on the body itself? How does it help us make sense of the desire for
bodily modification.? Why is bodily change necessary to make life livable ? Is to
desire bodily modification to be taken in by the phantom of ontological fulfilment,
which Derrida warns us against ? I want to suggest that we can understand such a
desire without such metaphysical commitments.
There are different models of the relationship between the body and the self which
can be employed here. One account sees the relation between the self and the body as
one of ownership. If my body is owned by me then I can exercise my autonomy by
styling that body in the way I please, in a way which I find reflects my inner self, or
perhaps to approximate to the ideals of gendered embodiment which surround me. A
parallel account would here be offered of the practice of cosmetic surgery , and there
are writers who want to offer this shared justification for both practices; The reason I
say its cosmetic surgery is because people are always changing their bodies maybe
we would take the stigma away. We wouldnt see it as...pathological..[but] a way of
organising your body to suit your image of yourself ...why do you want to become a
man? because I prefer the way a penis looks on my body to the way a vagina
looks on my body
xxv
However this account seem to suggest a problematic view of
the relation between the body and the self. In Weiss words we must resist a notion of
gender as a way of wearing ones flesh as corporeal sign.
xxvi
What is problematic here
10
is that the self is seen as constituted independently of the body, and the body as some
object which that self possesses and can construct in a way that expresses their style
preference. This can neither capture the horror which many transsexual people feel
towards aspects of their embodiment, nor recognise the way in which embodiment is
constitutive of selfhood. It is this which we need to understand if we are to both make
sense of requests for bodily modification, and justify public facilitation of it.
Another account sees the body as simply a marker of gender identity, which enables it
to be read in a communal context. Bodily changes are then sought to allow others to
gauge, in an immediate way, the category in which we wished to be placed. I want
the phalloplasty because I want to be able to go swimming. [which includes of course
being able to use the male changing rooms].I dont have a problem once Im wearing
my swimming costume, or when I am dressed. Its the transition period when you
wonder if anyone is going to wonder.
xxvii
There is something right about this move,
but it cannot be the whole story. It sees the body only as a sign for others. It fails to
address the first person phenomenology , the unintelligibility which aspects of
embodiment can present to oneself.
The relation between the body and self is seen on these accounts as an expressive
one. This seems right . The problems arise because of the account of expression
which is then employed. For the content of what is expressed is conceived of
independently of its vehicle of expression. The vehicle (the body) is then evaluated in
terms of how adequately it captures what lies behind. On many accounts of
expression, however, this picture is replaced by one in which the content of what is
expressed can only be captured by its expressive vehicle. The content of the thought,
or sensation or emotional state is yielded by the expression itself. Wittgenstein insists
that the joy or sadness are present in the face itself, open to public view, and not
hidden in some realm behind it. What is involved in detecting such emotions seems
to be a recognition of certain contours, as those of fear, or joy or grief. What is
recognised is a unity, a certain physiognomy;
xxviii
though it seems perfectly possible
that the recognition of such physiognomy as joy is something which we may need, at
least in part, to be initiated into. But nonetheless it is the physiognomy itself which
yields the joyful content. If we have to define joy , that is what we would show. As
11
Merleau Ponty points out the smile, the relaxed face, gaiety of gesture really have
in them the rhythm of action, the mode of being in the world, which are joy itself
xxix

The body, which carries expressive content, is not simply the anatomical body. It is a
body with a shape or form, which we read directly in terms of the way it carries the
way the world is for the subject. The body shape or form carries affective salience or
significance for us but it is a significance which is directly perceived, although we
may require cultural initiation into such perception. We dont notice the anatomical
configuration and derive the joy or sadness for it. We respond to the face directly as
joyful or sad. On detecting such physiognomy we are provided with reasons for
responding in certain ways, comforting if the expression is pain or sadness, smiling in
response to expressions of joy. In suggesting that a grasp of expressive content yields
reasons for responding in certain ways no process of inference need be involved. As
Merleau Ponty points out I do not understand the gestures of others by some kind of
intellectual interpretation;the communication or comprehension of gestures comes
about through the reciprocity of my intentions and the gestures of others, of my
gestures and intentions discernible in the conduct of other people
xxx
It is through my
body that I understand people.
xxxi


It is important to stress that the significance of such bodily shapes requires anchorage
in a context and background. Behaviour is expressive only as contextualised, only
against particular backgrounds. It is this context which will distinguish expressions of,
fear, for example, from mere pretence, engaged in, maybe, for the purposes of
explaining what fear is. what determines our judgment, our concepts and reactions ,
is not what one man is doing now, an individual action , but the whole hurly-burly of
human actions, the background against which we see any actionSeeing life as a
weave, this pattern (pretence say)is not always complete and is varied in a multiplicity
of ways ..And one pattern in the weave is interwoven with many others
xxxii

Expressive content then is constituted out of a certain physiognomy, providing non
inferential reasons for a range of intersubjective responses, woven into shared ways of
living. Expressive content has a kind of immediacy, reflecting the extent to which we
feel at home with the expressions, the extent to which we know how to find our
way around with them. This means that there are also occasions when we cannot read
12
the physiognomy, cannot find our feet with people, and do not know how to respond
to them.
xxxiii

Above I suggested that claiming a gender was positioning oneself in the context of
everyday social practices. I am now suggesting that such positioning is expressed
through the body. At homeness in everyday social practices is made possible by an
at homeness with bodies whose position in those practices is immediate and
readable. In the case of the transsexual body however, the positionality which it
expresses, is not one with which, those whose bodies they are, can find themselves at
home.

VI

The physiognomy of the body carries our subjectivity , not as a sign of something
which lies behind, but as its constituting form. Within phenomenological accounts
our sense of self is a sense of a body, and involves an awareness of that body as
having a certain shape or form. My whole body for me is not an assemblage of
organs juxtaposed in space . I am in undivided possession of it and know where each
of my limbs is through a body image in which each are included. asa form in the
sense used by Gesalt psychologyas an attitude directed towards a certain existing or
possible task.
xxxiv
Such a body image is necessary for our intentional engagements
with the world, in which the body is experienced as a potentiality for action in the
world , and the world as a world of possibility for the body. Our body images are
already morphologies, that is mediated forms of organisation, not simply brute causal
responses to anatomical shape. Within psychoanalytic thought our body image is
formed by being invested with affect. Particular bits of the body become significant
because of their potential for pleasure and pain, or because they are invested with
significance by others
xxxv
Such body images therefore are images of the body as
expressive. Our own thoughts, hopes and desires are grasped as bodily possibilities.

One way of trying to make sense of the relation to aspects of their body articulated
by some transsexual people, would be to suggest a disjuncture between first person
body image and the expressive content which the body has for others. In the account
offered by Sartre, for example, the body-for itself; the body engaged in projects in the
13
world, is the body from the first person point of view. It is this sense of our bodies
and thereby of ourselves, which we struggle to maintain when faced with the look of
others. That looks fixes the body into a determinate type, with fixed characteristics,
which constrain the possibilities for action. That is the look which we must resist if
we are to maintain our own autonomy.
xxxvi
This seems to be the account which Fanon
offers of arriving in France and discovering the expressive significance which his
body has for others. Assailed at various points [my pre existing] corporeal schema
crumbles. I [subject] my self to an objective examination. I [discover] my blackness,
my ethnic characteristics; and I am battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism,
intellectual deficiency , fetishism , racial defects , slave ships and above allshogood
eating
xxxvii


However such a model does not seem to capture transsexual experience. It does not
seem that the first person bodily schema of a trans woman prior to treatment is that of
a woman. The problem rather is that the body she has is one to which she gives the
same significance as it is given by others. That is why she wants to change it.
Sartres account fails to accommodate the role of others in the formation of our first
person corporeal schema. Merleau Ponty
xxxviii
emphasises the importance to early
formation of the subject , of the phenomena of imitation, copying the bodily gestures
of others, returning a smile with a smile. Here I respond to the actions of another by
experiencing them as possibilities for my own body. This process involves a pairing
of my body with the body of others. The corporeal schema , or sense of bodily form,
which enables my own responsiveness to the world, is a schema which is derived
from such pairings. The relation with others is therefore formative of the first person
sense of our bodies which inform our possible engagements with the world. Given the
role of others in the formation of our first person corporeal schema, there is not then
the radical disjuncture between that and the image reflected back from outside , which
Sartre (and some psychoanalytic) theorists suggest. The significance of certain bodily
shapes, the expressive force which they carry, to those outside us, becomes integrated
into our own sense of our body. (This process was illustrated graphically by De
Beauvoir when she discusses the way in which women come to experience
themselves as Other to the norm which is masculinity . She characterises the young
girls sense of her body as she reaches puberty. when the breasts and the body hair is
developing , a sentiment is born which sometimes becomes pride but which is
14
originally shame)
xxxix
For Merleau Ponty our body image was enabling of our
intentional engagement with the world. What is highlighted by De Beauvoir and
others is that our body feels to us in such a way that it makes possible certain kinds of
agency and inhibits others .

Given this picture the sense of ourselves as sexed is a sense of ourselves with a bodily
form which is expressive of certain possibilities within the world. (It is important to
remind ourselves of the multiplicity of those possibilities and of the way that
expressive content is dependent on background and context..They are nonetheless
possibilities which are carried by a certain physiognomy.) How, then, are we to make
sense of people laying claim to a sex/gender which is not that which their bodies
expresses, even to themselves ? What is clear is that for some people the possibilities
for agency and the positions in local practices which are expressed by their bodily
morphology, are not ones with which they can find their feet. The practices are not
ones in which they feel, at home; in which they can intelligibly take part. To return to
Derrida , it is as if they are floundering in a language which does not feel like their
own. This is the point at which, in order to enter into a form of life, they lay claim to
an identity other than that assigned. What is crucial here, is that the claimed identity is
captured by, expressed in terms of, a certain bodily morphology. Their desire for a
certain position is expressed with reference to a certain bodily shape. This desire may
not be one which the shape of their actual anatomical body can carry, within a given
social context. Consequently their current body image, instead of facilitating
unthinking intentional engagement with the world, inhibits such a possibility. Their
body thereby becomes unintelligible to themselves and rules out engaging in the
world alongside others with the kind of shared intelligibility which makes life livable.
What aspects of the body needs to be changed so that it can be expressive of such
possible agency, and enable such shared intelligibility, is a very local matter.

The suggestion I am making is therefore this. The content of our subjectivity is
captured by expressive bodily morphologies. There is a certain congruence in the
salience which our body carries for ourselves and for others. Certain bodily shapes
from the first person and third person perspective make appropriate certain kinds of
activities and certain kinds of responses. With regard to their own body, these are just
the kind of activities/responses with which the transsexual person cannot find their
15
feet. The kind of practices with which they could find their feet (more) are expressed
by a different bodily shape, (both first personally and third personally). For the
transsexual subject, therefore, the content of their own desire is captured with
reference to a bodily form. To find themselves intelligible, and for others to find them
so, requires a different bodily shape. The desire for body modification expressed by
transsexual people can , then, be differentiated from other desires to modify our
bodies, such as that found in many forms of cosmetic surgery. The desire for
differently shaped breasts or noses is one which can only too intelligibly be expressed
by those with female bodily forms in a variety of cultural settings. The wrongness of
the transsexual body is not simply the failure to approximate to some valorised ideal.
It is a wrongness which make someones life unlivable by inhibiting intentional
agency and shared forms of life
xl


VII

In articulating the livability of bodily morphologies in relation to intelligible and
local forms of life we must be careful to bear in mind that the expressiveness of our
bodies remains both open and indeterminate. The expressive possibilities which can
be carried by differently shaped bodies is subject to modification and change.
Changes can only be successful, however, if the expressive content can be recognised,
and appropriate responses are forthcoming. The disjuncture between the position
claimed in local practices and the expressive possibilities of ones own body will not
always make bodily modification the only option. As Merleau Ponty remarks the
psycho physiological equipment leaves a great variety of possibilities open.
xli

Explicit transgendered activism of the kind which Butler endorses, as well as lots of
less obvious everyday activities, expand the expressive possibilities of differently
shaped bodies. But for this to work such activism and activities have to take place in
contexts in which they can be found intelligible . In other contexts body modification
may be the only route to such intelligibility.

In this paper I have offered an alternative to Butlers picture of the trans person as a
gender outlaw challenging our public gender norms. It is replaced by a picture of
people , often painfully, negotiating their place in everyday social interactions. The
account has been informed by a view of gender, not as an originary truth about us, but
16
rather as a relatively gathered and local singularity to which we lay claim in an
attempt to find our feet with each other.
xlii


Endnotes

i
J.Butler 2004 Undoing Gender , Routledge, London and New York, p.58.

ii in this paper I will be primarily using the term transsexual for those people who seek
bodily transformation via hormones or surgery.

iii
J.Prosser 1999a Exceptional Locations : Transsexual Travelogues. in K. More and
S.Whittle ed.. Reclaiming Gender: Transsexual Grammars at the fin de siecle. Cassell, New
York, pp83-117, p..90; see also J.Prosser 1998 Second Skins: the Body Narratives of
Transsexualiyt, Columbia University Press , New York


iv
J.Halberstam 1998 Female Masculinity Duke University Press. Durham p.148-9

v
Undoing Gender p.81

vi
For further discussion of the problems with this picture see R.Alsop, A.Fitzsimons and
K.Lennon 2002 Theorizing Gender, Polity , Oxford, cp. 9 Borderlands and Gendered
Homes

vii
J.Butler 1990 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity Routledge, New
York and London.

viii
S,Stone 1997 The Empire Strikes Back :a Post Transsexual Manifesto in K,.Conboy ,
N.Medina and S.Stanbury ed Writings on the Body, Columbia University Press ,New York,
p.351-352
ix
Undoing Gender, 29.

x
.ibid 3

xi
She discusses the lives and deaths of Brandon Teena, Gloria Araujo, Venus Xtravaganza:
see Undoing Gender p.251 , Jenny Livingston (dir) 1990 Paris is Burning Miramax

xii
Undoing Gender 2

xiii
ibid 3/4
17

xiv
I am grateful to Lawrence Nixon for stressing this distinction between Butler and
Wittgenstein. For extended discussion of this point see his PhD thesis , Difference and
Understanding:Wittgenestein and Judith Butler, University of Hull 2006

xv
Undoing Gender 21

xvi
Saturday March 18, 2006 The Guardian This is an edited extract from Self-Made Man:
My Year Disguised As A Man, by Norah Vincent, published April 2006 by Atlantic Books.
This is a useful description of the kind of practices I have in mind, though overall I think the
project of the book was problematic

xvii
ibid

xviii
E.Probyn 1996 Outside Belongings, Routledge, London and New York, 109

xix
J.Morris 1974 Conundrum, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 174.

xx
R.N.Lancaster and M. di Leonardo, 1997, The Gender Sexuality Reader Routledge,
London and New York.


xxi
J.Prosser 1999 b A Palinode on Photography and the Transsexual Real.
Autobiographical Studies, 14.1, 85

xxii
J.Derrida 1998 Monolingalism of the Other , or the Prosthesis of Origin , trans p.Mensah
Stanford University Press Stanford

xxiii
G.Bennington Double Tounging:Derridas Monolingualism file://C\My
Documents\Geoffry Bennington.htm accessed Dec 2005, p. 1-2

xxiv
ibid, p. 11.

xxv
Halberstam in Z.I. Nataf 1996 Lesbians Talk Transgender Scarlett Press London


xxvi
G.Weiss 1999 Body Images:Embodiment as Intercorporeality, Routledge, London and
New York, 5)

xxvii
Nataf, 1996 .24

xxviii
L.Wittgenstein 1967 Zettel Oxford, Blackwells, 376

xxix
M. Merleau Ponty 1999 Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C.Smith, Routledge,
London and New York, p. 186

xxx
ibid 185

18

xxxi
ibid 186

xxxii
Zettel 567-569

xxxiii
Further discussion of the nature of expression is found in K. Lennon Natural
Expressions forthcoming
xxxiv
The Phenomenology of Perception p.98

xxxv
see Theorising Gender chapter 9 Borderlands and Gendered Homes

xxxvi
J.P.Sartre 1969 Being and Nothingness, trans Hazel Barnes , Methuen, London 1969, p.
260

xxxvii
F.Fanon 1967 Black Skins , White Masks, Grove Press, New York p.60

xxxviii
M.Merleau Ponty 1964 The Primacy of Perception , Northwestern Univesity Press.
Evanson IL.

xxxix
S.de Beauvoir 1972 The Second Sex , Penguin, London,332

xl
. In cases of demands for cosmetic surgery I would suggest a further sense of body image is
involved, in which the body is seen as an object, rather than as expressive , compared to an ideal object
and found wanting. This kind of objectification and its distinction from body image, as I have
described it, needs careful discussion but is outside the scope of this paper. It is also the case that the
boundaries here will not be clear cut and there may be some cases of cosmetic surgery which fit the
expressive model.

xli
Phenomenology of Perception ( 189 )

xlii
I am grateful to my colleagues in Hull Centre for Gender Studies and to transsexual students and
visitors from Press for Change who have discussed their lives with us over many years. I am also
grateful for responses made to an earlier version of the paper at the Society for Women in Philosophy
Conference April 2006 ; and to the readers for Radical Philosophy.